Countdown and Chaos: The Final Week Before My First Novel Debut

Field Notes from the Fandom Frontier

This week, I stood on the threshold: seven days until the debut of my first romance novel under my new pen name. As I prepare to introduce my story to the world, I find myself immersed in a flurry of tasks. This isn't just about publishing a book. It's about laying the groundwork for a fandom, a future reader community, and a long-haul career in romance fiction. But you know, no pressure or anything.

Here’s a quick rundown of what this week demanded:

• Finalized Amazon pre-order settings — a deceptively simple task with surprisingly opaque requirements.
• Uploaded the final manuscript — an operation that turned unexpectedly harrowing (and deserves its own blog post).
• Set up onboarding emails for new newsletter subscribers — hopefully the first members of my future fandom. This newsletter will serve as the foundation for everything else to come. I'll be unpacking the newsletter a lot more in future posts. Just know for now that it's a thing that exists and I have put a non-trivial amount of thought into its architecture.
• Wrote and formatted a “loss leader” short story, starring side characters from my debut, to entice and reward subscribers. Basically I wrote a whole extra story for readers to get a little more about the story they hopefully already loved as a special gift for signing up for my newsetter. (Again, more on this in future posts.)
• Launched initial Amazon ads — low-budget, low-stakes, but symbolically massive. The book’s engine is now humming in the background, waiting for readers to arrive. The interface of amazon ads is atrocious and someone from a user experience background really needs to help them out. I'm low-key terrified I'm spending money I don't mean to because I don't fully understand the campaign I'm running.
• Conducted market research — as I do weekly, checking keywords, surveying comps, and keeping my ear to the ground in the genre. You know, read more books. "Market research." (Kate, why are you taking so long to get those tasks done? Oh, sorry, I was busy over here...doing market research...)
• Finalized early social media presence — I laid the groundwork for my pen name’s online identity by setting up profiles on GoodReads (though my author page was denied—I'll reapply once the book is officially live), BookBub, TikTok, and Bluesky. The Goodreads denial was annoying, but also a revealing reminder of how opaque the gatekeeping can be, even in indie publishing spaces that supposedly democratize access. It’s not just a matter of visibility. Platforms like Goodreads function as cultural legitimizers. Being unable to officially “exist” there as an author felt weirdly disempowering, as if the book I’ve poured myself into still isn’t quite real (yet).

But even more interesting, to me, is how these platforms fit into the early scaffolding of a fandom. My academic background is in studying online fan communities—public and semi-private ones alike, from Twitter to Discord—and while those studies focused on music and games, I’m finding surprising continuities with romance fiction fandoms. I’m currently working with what I’d call an “imaginary fandom”: a projected, hoped-for community of future readers who don’t yet exist, but whom I’m building for anyway.

My strategy is to create the right touchpoints now—an inviting newsletter, character extras, open channels of communication—so that if and when readers do arrive, the architecture for connection is already there. I’ve added a poll to my onboarding emails asking readers where they spend their time online, with the goal of focusing my presence where people actually are rather than casting a wide, frantic net. (You know, doing user research. Something amazon ads should try...)

Right now, while the fandom is small (or potential), I’m especially focused on fostering direct engagement. Not mass marketing, but person-to-person recognition—an approach inspired by what I’ve seen in fan communities where trust, intimacy, and shared language drive participation far more than flashy promotion ever could.

There’s something uniquely energizing about inhabiting both creator and researcher roles. I don’t feel a tension yet between them—just a lot of curiosity. This project is, in part, an experiment: can the things I’ve studied in theory actually help me cultivate a fandom in practice?

This final week before launch has been a strange combination of logistical frenzy and quiet watching. I’m laying tracks for a train that hasn’t yet arrived, trusting it might someday. As a creator, that’s nerve-wracking. As an ethnographer, it’s fascinating. I’m struck by how much this moment mirrors the dynamics I’ve observed in fan cultures: the balance of structure and spontaneity, anticipation and uncertainty, intimacy and scale. Publishing a book, especially under a new name, feels like tossing a signal flare into the void. But I’ve studied what happens when people start answering back. And I’m hoping—anxiously, curiously, excitedly—that this is the beginning of that conversation.